Peri Peri Sauce

Make your own peri peri, or piri piri, sauce at home with this recipe. A traditional African sauce made from African Bird’s Eye chiles.

If you have not tried peri peri sauce, this is one you need to put on the list. Peri Peri sauce is a traditional African sauce made from spicy African Bird’s Eye chili peppers. It is also known as piri piri, or pili pili. It’s perfect for any spicy food lover.

If you want the TRUEST of the TRUE peri peri sauce experiences, you’ll make this with African Bird’s Eye peppers grown in Africa, as the soil conditions there are completely different than anywhere else in the world, which influences the pepper flavor, and therefore the resulting sauce.

So let’s all go to Africa!

But of course! It is the same with peppers grown in New Mexico or the Caribbean. Hatch chiles, for example, are so darned good when you get them directly from New Mexico.

I love this sauce. You may have heard of the world’s most famous brand of Peri Peri sauce – Nando’s. This is a homemade version.

Homemade Peri Peri sauce (or should I say Homemade Nando’s?) is simple enough to make. It requires no actual cooking, just some chopping and processing of the ingredients. It’s an oil-based sauce, at least it is with our version, ideal for dipping, and it goes GREAT with chicken and seafood.

Let’s talk about how we make it, shall we?

Ingredients Needed

1 pound red chilies chopped – African Bird’s Eye peppers are traditional, but you can sub with red peppers available to you, including bell peppers

4 cloves garlic chopped

1 teaspoon smoked paprika you can sub in other chili powders

1/2 cup chopped cilantro

1/4 cup chopped basil

1/2 cup olive oil or vegetable oil

Juice from 1 lemon (lemon juice)

Salt to taste

Making this Peri Peri Sauce Recipe

Add all ingredients to a food processor or blender. Process to form a smooth sauce to your preferred consistency. You can strain out some of the excess liquid if you’d like, or just use it as-is.

Enjoy! Refrigerate until ready to use.

BOOM! That’s it. It’s an incredibly easy recipe to make.

What Goes Great with Peri Peri Sauce

I made some chicken wings and chicken legs with ours and we LOVED them. Peri Peri sauce goes particularly well with grilled chicken of any kind.

However, it’s also wonderful with seafood, such as shrimp or whitefish.

About the Chili Peppers and Recipe Notes

If you can’t source African Bird’s Eye chilies, you can sub in an equivalent amount of red peppers of your choice.

I have made this with long red cayenne peppers, red jalapeno peppers, and fingerling peppers, all to similar results.

Traditional ingredients also call for a variety of herbs, though ours incorporates basil and cilantro. You might try oregano and tarragon.

You’ll find regional differences throughout Africa. Such a great recipe.

Patty’s Perspective

This is a great sauce to have on hand because it can be used to enhance any number of dishes. Make it on the weekend and use it throughout the week for sandwich spreads, quick sauce or rub for chicken, spooned over tacos, whatever you think!

Frequently Asked Hot Sauce Questions

Here are answers to some of the most common questions I get on other sauces:

How long will this sauce keep?

It should keep a few months easily in the fridge, or even longer. It’s all about the acidity. To be technical, target level ph for shelf stable foods is below 4.6 ph, but should probably be lower for home cooks, around 4.0 or so, to account for errors. If you’re concerned, add more vinegar to lower the ph. Sauces made with fermented chili peppers will last even longer.

A recipe for chicken wings that have been brined, rubbed with chili powder and garlic, then tossed with your own homemade Peri Peri sauce. Then we grill them to perfection and toss them again in Peri Peri sauce. Win!

NEVER MISS A RECIPE

36 comments

This sauce rocks!! The only thing I did differently is add some more spices. I’m also not a huge fan of lemon so I used half a lemon and also added some red pepper flakes, cayenne pepper, garlic powder, black pepper, and some minced onion all to taste. This enhanced the flavor in my opinion and while I didn’t have the traditional African Birds Eye, I used dried chilies instead and it was off the wall.

Hello Mike, Love your site. Two Questions:
1) your pictures show a “chunky” sauce yet your instructions are to blend to a paste. The pictures do not reflect a paste. Where is the difference.

2) I have a lot of peppers from the garden; Ghost, Jalapeño, Cayenne, Red Chili, etc. I am planning on making a bunch of sauces but I need to have them last at least a year. In the above instructions ( I can jar/can); Do I make the Peri Peri and the other hot sauces, then place them into the hot water bath as part of the canning process? Is this what you mean in how to store them longer? If so, what is the canning time for each of the sauces? 5min, 10min 20min???
Thanks,
Marie

Marie, it’s really to your own consistency preference. I actually updated the description to make that more clear. Thank you for alerting me to that. For the canning/jarring process, 15 minutes in a hot water bath is usually sufficient. I have water bath instructions on this Tomato Chutney Recipe that you can follow: https://www.chilipeppermadness.com/recipes/tomato-chutney/. Let me know if this helps. Same process.

Thanks, Keith! I would focus on the peppers and add in the liquids in smaller proportions until you achieve the proper consistency. The solids can be mostly ratio’d up, but be careful with the liquids.

One pound of Bird’s Eye??
I just tried this and it was completely uneatable. WAY TOO HOT
My wife is from Ghana and she couldn’t take more than a small dap on her tounge before she spit it out, and she can literally drink Nando’s XX sauce.
I find it hard to believe that this much, one pound, is what is called for.

Trever, yes, 16 ounces is a lot of peppers, but traditional peri peri sauce is highly pepper based, so the measurement is correct. It sounds to me like you’re trying to find a Nando’s Peri Peri Sauce copycat recipe, which this is not. This is more of a traditional sauce. If you’d like to more closely approximate Nando’s, find out their peppers, ingredients and ratios. You can also sub in different peppers, such as the red bell pepper, as discussed in the post, so you can achieve flavors closer to what you are looking for. I’m happy to help you adapt. Best of luck.

Good recipe Michael, but I must say that the sauce is portuguese in origin, the Nando’s grilled chicken franchise was opened by a portuguese emigrant in South Africa. The piri-piri (or peri peri in several African dialects) pepper was brought to Africa by the Portuguese.

Can I make a version without oil? I do Slimming World and would love syn free version

REPLY: Joanne, it won’t be the same, but YES, you can omit the oil and use vinegar instead. If you do this, though, you might want to simmer the sauce a bit to mellow it out. Try it fresh and with a simmer and see which youprefer. — Mike from Chili Pepper Madness.

Reply

WELCOME!

Hi, Everyone! I'm Mike, your chilihead friend who LOVES good food. I love it spicy, and hopefully you do, too. Here you'll find hundreds of spicy recipes of all levels, some with a little, some with a LOT, but everything is adjustable to your personal tastes. You'll also learn a lot about chili peppers and seasonings, my very favorite things.